Streamlabs articles

A stream overlay is the layer that turns a raw webcam feed and a game capture into a recognisable channel. Camera frame, alerts, chat, sub goal, Starting and BRB scenes, all sitting at 1920x1080 over your gameplay. You can ship one in an hour with free packs, or spend €150 on a custom commission From eight years of running Partner onboarding for an agency.. This guide walks the full path: pick a pack or design from scratch, size every element, drop it into OBS or Streamlabs, and test before going live (confirmed in the Twitch Creator Camp doc on 2026-04-29).

Twitch lifted its simulcasting ban back in October 2023, and the platform stopped penalising combined chat overlays in February 2026. Affiliates and Partners can now stream to YouTube, Kick, Facebook and TikTok at the same time as Twitch, with three live conditions: keep Twitch chat in view, don't link out to other platforms during the broadcast, and keep your Twitch quality on par with the others. The piece below is half setup tutorial, half buying guide. Marcus here: we compare the cloud relay route (Restream.io, StreamYard, Castr) against the local route (OBS multi-RTMP, Aitum, Streamlabs Multistream), price each one against current 2026 plans, work out how much upload bandwidth you actually need, and answer the questions readers keep asking on Reddit, Quora and the OBS forum. Skip to the section that matches the route you already lean towards, or read top to bottom if you're starting fresh.

A webcam in OBS Studio lives or dies on three settings nobody tells you about on day one: Resolution Type, Video Format. (cross-checked with two reseller integrations live as of April 2026) The order of your filters. Speaking from the OAuth flow we ship, get those right and a $70 webcam looks closer to a Sony ZV-1F. Marcus here: get them wrong and a $300 Logitech MX Brio still ships washed-out skin and stutter at 60 fps. This guide walks the full path from the Sources panel through the filter chain, with the exact menu paths and the troubleshooting moves that actually fix black screens and mid-stream disconnects Tested on a base PS5 Slim and an RTX 4070 reference build..

Twitch chat on screen is a free engagement upgrade. Done right, the same browser source carries names, badges, BTTV emotes and a transparent background that does not fight the gameplay. Done wrong, you ship a white square that eats CPU and viewers cannot read. This guide walks the popout URL, the dimensions that fit a 1920x1080 canvas, the custom CSS streamers actually paste, the StreamElements and Streamlabs widgets, the BetterTTV / FrankerFaceZ / 7TV trick, plus the Stream Deck button that toggles chat on and off mid-stream.

Marcus here: picking software is a 60-second decision once you know your budget and your CPU headroom. Marcus here: below sits a quick verdict, a full comparison table, then a tool-by-tool breakdown with verified 2026 pricing and Twitch-tested notes from our team.

You want to go live tonight. Worth pinning. Not spend a weekend reading docs. So which tool actually fits: Streamlabs Desktop, the friendlier all-in-one that ships with alerts. (cross-checked with two reseller integrations live as of April 2026) OBS Studio, the open-source workhorse that 60-70% of top Twitch streamers rely on? In our integration tests, both can stream 1080p60 to Twitch, Kick, YouTube. The difference shows up in CPU load, recovery from crashes, the cost of overlays, and how much patience you've for setup screens.

A Twitch poll is a built-in viewer voting feature, available to Affiliates and Partners, that lets the broadcaster or a moderator post a question with two to five answers and a 1 to 10 minute timer. Viewers cast one free vote, and optional Channel Points or Bits unlock extra votes for power users. This guide covers the exact rules, the chat-command path, the Stream Manager path, what mods can and cannot do, the mobile-app gap, and the third-party fallbacks for streamers who have not hit Affiliate yet. Every spec is checked against Twitch's help portal and the Helix Polls API as of April 2026.

A creator I work with hit this last week — pick of the litter, in 2026: OBS Studio 32.1.2 for the encoder, StreamElements or Streamer.bot for chat and overlays, Sound Alerts for paid Bits alerts, NVIDIA App for ShadowPlay-style instant clips, VoiceMeeter Banana for audio routing on Windows, and StreamLadder or Eklipse to slice VODs into vertical clips. Twitch Studio is gone. The recommended stack now lives outside Twitch.